I’ve been using manager.io for a while which is free, cross-platform and works fine, but it’s closed source and I’m concerned that sooner or later they will alter the deal. I’d rather move to something more open on my own terms, and not into one of these cloud accounting services who wants $xx/mo for the trouble.
KMyMoney looks quite nice but it seems to lack business functionality like invoicing - a few projects have come and gone over the years and it seems like gnucash is the only thing suitable. Does anyone have any experience or tips for using it? I found some docs for generating BAS reports which looks promising.
Not used GnuCash and it might be better for your use-case. But thought i’d put it out there that we have started using ERPNext, however with all the government restrictions around things like STP, then we ended up going for MYOB until we get a time to see how we can get it working to government stipulations. If you don’t have to do payroll, then it might be ok.
Thanks for the callout, I’d never heard of it and it looks pretty powerful. I guess I’m a simple person with simple needs and a program that I can run offline on my computer is what I’m aiming for this time. Good to know there are options.
I use GNUCash for my accounting purposes. I just use it for keeping track of income and expenses, and importantly being able to generate reports for income for each financial year for the tax return. It’s pretty good for those purposes, and when looking for an alternative, I couldn’t find anything more suitable.
I’ve dabbled with the invoicing functionality but I found it very disappointing. The invoice template is very basic and it was difficult to add extra details like bank account number for transferring funds. I wouldn’t recommend it for invoicing. I use another solution for that (Invoice Simple - proprietary).
Jonathan Corbet at LWN.net has been looking for a opensource replacement for QuickBooks for quite a few years. Some of his write-ups are linked from this page. Eventually he settled on GnuCash earlier this year. If you are looking for some general impressions of the various options he tried out it might be worth a read through the articles.
